Editorial: Complacency with emails can be dangerous

Published
10:14 pm CDT, Monday, July 25, 2016

Phones got smarter, then smaller and now larger. Videocassette players are officially relics, with the last one coming off the assembly line this month. Our connection to the online world has grown exponentially from the days of 2,400-baud dial-up modems to the smooth sailing of always-on streaming.

We don’t change technology, it changes us. Sometimes it makes us scratch our heads (cough, Windows 10) and sometimes we are slow to join in (think The Segway), but it still makes us adapt — even kicking and screaming all the way.

Why, then, is it so hard to get the message across about the nuclear devastation email can cause to a person’s life and career?

This is the oldest, mostly unchanged connection to the online world but the one that still gets more people in trouble than most anything other than perhaps Twitter or Facebook posts.

From the time that first electronic message was exchanged in the 1960s to its explosive growth in use in the 1970s and its place at the top of the digital hierarchy today, email has been steadfast.

It also didn’t take people and companies long to realize there were disadvantages along with the many advantages.

For one, it isn’t as easy as it would seem to wipe out any remnant of an email — especially from a corporate standpoint. Also, the law is pretty clear about the ability of businesses to search and reach employee emails sent using company equipment, even if a non-work email address is used — and 60 percent do, by the way. Public officials know this all to well, because their emails are subject to open records laws when business is being discussed.

There’s also the risk of hackers being able to access private and business correspondence with ease.

That doesn’t slow the exchange of off-color jokes, demeaning statements about the boss or co-workers or gory details to friends about the drunken weekend past.

Or your disdain for the person managing former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ campaign, your anger over cable show pundit criticism and your attempts to steer the support of the entire Democratic Party to Hillary Clinton.

If anyone would know better than to do anything by email, you would think it would be Clinton and the Democratic leadership. (To be fair, Republicans have had issues of their own when as many as 22 million emails sought as part of an investigation into George W. Bush’s administration ended up going missing in 2007).

But apparently Debbie Wasserman Schultz didn’t learn any lessons. The congresswoman was long-time chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.

That was before Sunday, which was about two days after WikiLeaks posted hundreds of emails that showed the lopsided inner workings of Schultz’s DNC. The ensuing outrage from both parties prompted Wasserman Schultz to step down from a position that had brought her significant attention and power over the past five years.

It’s just another reminder — granted, a pretty huge one — about how dangerous it can be to grow complacent about the words we use and the thoughts we convey and how we do it.

Unlike the good old days of telephone conversations that couldn’t be recorded and therefore could be denied and denied some more, emails float around in the warehouses of data for a long time.

And that means they can come back to bite you as quickly as it takes to forward a copy to the last person you would ever want to see it.